Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductive layers of material over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon. Many integrated circuits are typically manufactured on a single semiconductor wafer, and individual dies on the wafer are singulated by sawing between the integrated circuits along a scribe line. The individual dies are typically packaged separately, in multi-chip modules, for example, or in other types of packaging.
A wafer level package (WLP) structure is used as one of the package structures for semiconductor components of electronic products. An increased number of input-output (I/O) electrical contacts combined with increased demand for high performance integrated circuits (ICs) has led to the development of fan-out type WLP structures enabling larger pitches of bumps for the I/O electrical contacts.
Although existing WLP structures and methods of fabricating wafer-level packages have generally been adequate for their intended purpose, they have not been entirely satisfactory in all respects.